Make Me King
by Ixina
Summary: KeiSho: When is it finally time to say 'I love you'..? Silent All These Years - same story, new title, and a boost in the warning - this one's skirting the border of an R rating, now. Bring on the reviews!
1. Just A Bang, Then A Clatter

Author's Note : it's more of a prologue than an actual chapter... but hell.

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_"just a bang then a clatter as an angel hits the ground.."_

_  
  
_I was lighting up a cigarette when they shot him the first time.  
  
There is a sublimely primitive grace to everything that Sho does, from the way he stretches in the morning to the way he wields a forty-five; a fine thread of instinctive precision woven through even the most mundane of gestures which is neither practiced nor premeditated. A long-lost piece of human nature's intricate puzzle, dormant and buried deep beneath modern practicality - a gift, a fluke, an errant gene. Call it what you want to call it. Fed by the streets and strengthened by anarchy, the seed of transcendence has sprouted within Nobody's Child. With patience and nurture, it has flourished into something nearly feline in nature.  
  
I have taught him so much. I have taught him so well.  
  
There is only so much that one can learn about life, in Mallepa; or, rather, there is only so much that one can apply to it. Brilliance is wasted here. Compassion is a precious commodity, and trust is nearly always fatal. Perhaps some other place, some other time ... ah, but it pains me to think about all the things he'll never be. I can only take solace in what he has become. He has everything that he needs to make his way through the cracked and crowded stretches of war zone that pass for the streets of this city. He is already smarter, faster, and far more capable than the general population. His guard is virtually impenetrable. In time, he will be nothing short of untouchable. In time, I will not have to worry.  
  
That time is coming sooner than later. He barely needs me here, tonight. He could do this with his eyes closed. Toshi's latest batch of Isoflurane had cooked up particularly potent, and the pack of comatose, low-rate Indochinese street thugs posed less of a threat to Sho's life than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. I worry too much, he tells me. I should know better. Tonight, I sit on a can-littered card table while Sho picks pockets, one by one. The safe will come after. It's always best to pat them down early, while the drugs are at their strongest. A safe can be shot in a second, any second. Sho knows all of this as well as he knows his own name. There's no reason to interfere.  
  
Nevertheless, I watch him like a hawk; mostly out of habit and partly because I enjoy looking at him. He has always been beautiful to me, in various ways and for various reasons. I look at the tall, lithe creature stepping light as a ghost through the rubble and remember him at nine, at twelve, at seventeen. I remember the quiet and calculating child with an angels face and tiny, birdlike hands; the way his bones seemed made of glass and his soul of iron. One seldom finds a child with more dignity, more presence of mind. I remember the phantom weight of him in my arms, warm and relaxed and utterly pliant in the way that only children can be when they sleep. Yes, he was beautiful, then; and beautiful, too, as he grew towards adulthood - as his face smoothed and sharpened with the lines of manhood, gathered its wisdom and tucked it away in his cheekbones and jaw, and in the folds of his eyes. I loved to watch his bones stretch, his muscles harden. I took pride in these things. Now I watch him vault lightly over a comatose obstacle - two steps on the wall, then next on the ground, silent as a mouse all the while and never for a moment unsure.  
  
"Nothing worth a good goddamn in this place," he mutters over his shoulder.  
  
"Gold teeth, maybe?" I offer. Sho is on the verge of prying open a mouth when my ill-smothered laughter stops him. He shoots me a decidedly dirty look.  
  
"You'd better hope so," he counters, and threatens me emptily with a shake of his fist before the little smile that I know and love so well finally slips past his ruse. He riffles through some drawers, dumping them in piles on the desk and glaring at the contents with distaste. I shake my head, chuckle under my breath, dig through my pockets for a battered pack of cigarettes that I'm fairly sure Sho hasn't confiscated. Yes, he could do this with his eyes closed. He barely needs me at all, tonight.  
  
The shot goes off with a ping and a hiss, nearly silent. The world snaps into slow motion around me, a dreamlike haze in which hours take seconds, and seconds seem like forever and then some. The bullet takes the gun from his hand, grazes his fingers, shocks him silent. Sho steps backwards lightly, pins his back to the wall, stares at his hand in wide eyed shock for a moment. He doesn't scream. He barely even gasps. The place is so quiet that it's nearly deafening. I drop the cigarette. Sho reaches with his good hand for the gun at his hip.  
  
The next three shots hit me square in the chest; silver light explodes behind my eyes, and my body goes numb. Somewhere very far away, I hear Sho shout my name, and his gun barrel explodes with a crack. I'm aware of falling backwards; it's the shock of the landing that finally hurts. My head cracks against the wall, and then I can feel it - the white hot pain welling up in my chest, seeping out through my limbs, coiling around my throat. I will not die. Even as the blood pools on my tongue, I know I will not die. I will hurt, I will bleed, I will struggle for consciousness, but bullets alone cannot kill me. I have found it to be both a blessing and a curse.  
  
Footsteps. Shouting. Another muted shot hisses past somewhere to my left, and there are guns cocking behind me. The reverberation in the floorboards rattles my broken ribcage; my lungs seize, my world spins. There are four voices all speaking at once in sharp, rapid Cantonese. I force my eyes open, but my vision falters, and there is an all-too-familiar ringing in my ears. Somewhere inside my head, a small voice is screaming; move, get up, you have to help him. But my body is very light, now, and the world is tumbling out of focus.  
  
The last thought I form before slipping under is that I was wrong, so very wrong. He needed me after all, tonight. And I have failed him. 

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A/N : I've got the next two chapters ready to go - but tell me what'cha think of this one, first. Constructive criticism makes my day. :) 


	2. Once Upon A Time In Mallepa

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When Sho was still very young, he dreamed of a family; a mother, a father, a big house by the river. He dreamed of new sneakers and toy cars, warm beds and home cooked meals. He made up names for his mother and father, picked the colors for the room he and his brother would share. He designed the playground down the street, where they would meet Toshi for baseball games. He'd heard enough stories to know what childhood was like; and in the slim twilight hours between the real world and dreams, he made one for himself from the scraps of what he knew. They would have a dog, he decided, and three bikes between them - one for Toshi, of course, when he came to play. Mom and Dad would always let Toshi come to play, and even stay the night.  
  
"Why don't you have your friend come and stay for the weekend?" Mom would say as she packed his school lunch. "It's so nice when he's around, and he's always liked our big house by the river."  
  
By the time Sho met Kei, those dreams were nearly dead and gone. He was almost ten, and far too old for fantasies of parents and families. Shinji and Toshi were his family - they were all that he needed, and if his parents didn't want him, well, then, fine. He could do better without them, anyway. He'd get rich, someday, and buy that house by the river all by himself. He'd have fast cars, not bikes, and nothing but candy in the kitchen. So what if it got cold at night in the derelict and decaying warehouse that they called a home? So what if he was hungry all the time? So what if he'd never had a toy to play with in his whole entire life? He didn't need any Mom or Dad. He didn't want any Mom or Dad. Of course not. Why would he? And if he happened to cry at night, when no one was listening - well, that didn't mean a thing. He didn't think about those things anymore. Not really.  
  
Kei had changed all that. Barely larger than a child, himself, his sure and quiet manner had provided Sho with his very first taste of stability. Kei always looked the same. Kei always came back. Kei could be counted on to keep both promises and secrets. He was kind to Shinji and Toshi. He brought food for them, never stole from them, stayed with them at night and kept an eye out for the roaming droves of older kids who had been known, in the past, to ambush them as they slept. He would lie beside Sho when the nights got cold, wrap him up in his coat and stroke his hair until he fell asleep.  
  
He grew with Kei, laughed with Kei, lived with Kei in a tired one-room flat in South Quadrant far away from the river and loved every second of it. He loved the little apartment with it's thin, high-set windows and peeling plaster. He and Shinji shared a bed, Toshi slept on the couch, and Kei never seemed to sleep anywhere. It wasn't Kei's house, or so he said, yet he remained to be a constant presence for the years to come. They had to boil the water before they drank it, and the electricity only worked half the time; but it was a place to sleep, a place to be warm, a place to keep their cumulative possessions safe from the elements. Toshi swept the floors clean twice a day. Kei brought home lamps and worn-out end tables, and an old TV with poor reception. He never seemed to mind the constant presence of three young and overeager minds. Like a patient older brother, he laughed when they drew on the walls with charcoal, and never argued with them when they ate their stolen sweets before their stole rice. He played with them, ate with them, stalked the streets with them in the evenings - but it was with Sho alone that his true allegiance lay. It was Sho to whom he taught his secrets, Sho with whom he talked the most. The others were welcome, but Sho was beloved.  
  
The years wore on. The old flat became to small for them. Toshi got a job as a pizza boy, with Kei for a cheerleader and Sho for a scout. Shinji fell in love with a fishmonger's daughter, and together they opened a small yet quasi-lucrative koi farm. Their money barely fit in cookie tins any longer, and when wads of bills ran over, they spent the surplus on stylish clothes and frivolous decorations and - in Toshi's case - a snazzy little vespa. They painted the flat three times over before they moved out. Shinji moved into the flat above the koi farm; Toshi found a warehouse apartment only two blocks from work. Sho and Kei rented a clean and modern little studio closer to the river. Sho found very quickly that he loved it, there, but that didn't stop him from looking back on their old, cramped flat in the South Quadrant and missing it just a little. Somehow, without ever drawing attention to itself, a family had formed and grown in those shabby rooms with their thin, high-set windows and peeling plaster. In a strange way, it had made the place almost beautiful. There was something in life to look back on and smile about. Sho found that he quite liked the feeling of it.  
  
From that day on, he looked forward to finding new things that he could leave behind and smile back on. Change was no longer frightening and filled with loss, but a challenging and bittersweet adventure. Nothing was too big to tackle, too difficult to figure, too high to set eyes on. The day that Sho became a man was the day he decided to learn everything.  
  
Kei became an inexhaustible font of information, a virtual oracle of street-sense and clever ideas. Kei taught him to read and write, and how to do math. He taught him how to hear a bullet coming. He taught him how to move without a sound. While Toshi hawked pizza and Shinji tended fish, Sho learned how to make a living from the greed and carelessness of others. He could shoot his way through a warehouse by fifteen. By seventeen, he had Toshi drugging pizzas and splitting profits. There was never a sliver of doubt in his mind that Kei was proud of his innovation, his determination, his aggressive brand of contagious enthusiasm. He made an art out of combat, a business out of stealing, and a life out of the cracked Mallepa streets. Sometime between very late and very early, when the money was counted and the celebrations slowly fading, Sho and Kei would sit on the roof and watch the city pass beneath them, and it was in those quiet moments between midnight and dawn when Sho was sure that he loved him. He'd never been sure what love was in the first place, but it had to be something like this, he decided. If it wasn't, then Sho wasn't sure that he was interested.  
  
Everything safe and constant lived in Kei.  
  
When they shot him in the chest, Sho's entire world shuddered.  
  
His entire arm was burning, throbbing; he could not will his fingers to move. With a strangled gasp, Sho hit the wall - and then it happened; the bullets tearing into Kei, one-two-three, cracking in the stale air like fireworks and reverberating in Sho's ears. The first shot stunned him, the second shot jarred him, and the third sent him reeling over backwards. No scream. No struggle. Just a bright flash of shocked eyes, and a shudder so deep that Sho felt in his own bones, felt it roll through the air around him like an invisible shock wave and rock the very foundations of what he considered to be reality. He reeled. Kei gasped. Sho screamed. Kei choked. Sho drew his second gun with his good arm, shot six times at the dark forms in the doorway. They shot back. Kei's lips pooled with blood. It would take more than three simple bullets to kill his preternatural friend - the rational half of Sho's mind knew this, of course - but when Kei's head had cracked against the wall, when that slender body had crumpled to the floor, something deep inside of him had gone cold.  
  
In the next split second, three distinctly different things happened. Sho could never sort out, afterward, which of them had been the catalyst. There was no way to say for sure what happened first - and in the end, it didn't matter a good goddamn.  
  
Part of the rotting stairway splintered and gave way, and took two of the impending attack force down with it in a hailstorm of nails and wood and broken bones.  
  
A bullet tore through Sho's right shoulder so clean and quick that, for a moment, his arm was simply numb. It was the scent of the wound that brought his senses back, when he again remembered to breathe - hot metal, burned flesh, and the sharp iron tang of blood, tinged with singed leather and smoldering silk - and then the pain exploded through him like a thousand white-hot knives. And inside Sho's head, Kei screamed long and loud - a single, anguished syllable echoing through his mind.  
  
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	3. For The Very First Time

  
  
I dream of barren spaces, and cold wind in the twilight; a single tree atop a hill, bare and gnarled and reaching for a slate gray sky. I dream of dead grass, of metal, of voices screaming into still air. I dream of blood in a spring from the rocks; blood on snow, the wind through the tree beneath a low-slung half-moon and liquid brown eyes as big as saucers. I dream the way no human dreams. I feel the wind. I smell the blood. The cold gathers in my chest like a tightly balled fist, spreads it's spidery fingers through my veins. The voices press against my ears.  
  
"...told you... ...underestimate... ...check them..."  
  
"...look fucking dead do you?"  
  
"...other rooms... ...two at a time.... ...the first place, like I said."  
  
Fragments of Cantonese dance though my dream like spinning shards of glass, slicing pictures against the inside of my head - and though I cannot immediately identify my whereabouts, I do know this; there is blood, too much blood. The dream is fading, but the blood-scent lingers thick as honey in the air. I can feel the boards beneath my back, now, and the shattered remnants of something beneath my hips, but these things are vague and somehow intangible. Only the blood and the cold are immediate, and the fragmented voices.  
  
I become aware of my body in stages. My head is twisted at an awkward angle, wedged against something solid and unmovable. One of my arms is above my head, and the other is wrenched at an odd angle beneath me. My hips are twisted sideways. My legs are pinned beneath the card table. Their is a cold, sharp pain in my chest, like a corset laced around my very lungs. My eyes are open, as they have been all along - but I cannot blink. I cannot swallow. I cannot even flex my fingers; I know this instinctively, and so I do not try to a single one of these things. This stasis is as common for a wounded vampire as a scab is to a wounded human. My preternatural body is stitching itself back together by the second; cells splitting, bonding, rearranging themselves in a complex dance of blood and bone and tissue to fill in the missing pieces. I have been healing since the second that I lost consciousness. In another five minutes or so, I will be able to stand. In another ten, I will be able to run.  
  
None of this matters right now. I'm trying to piece together the words, separate the voices, follow the rapid flow of conversation that ricochets between them like sharp, quick gunfire.  
  
"He's got it."  
  
"All of it?"  
  
"I think so - hold on, I'm checking."  
  
"Son of a bitch. Tear him apart, if you have to. Every cent accounted for, or it's our asses, you hear me?"  
  
The sounds of a struggle - shuffling feet and bones hitting floorboards, a loud clatter, a muttered curse - someone passes very near to me on the left, moving toward the sound of the commotion. I struggle to make sense of it, to fit the pieces of consciousness that I've gathered thus far back together and form the bigger picture.  
  
Then Sho curses, and gasps in pain.  
  
The world snaps and sharpens around me; my senses click back into place like the setting of a combination lock, and quite suddenly everything is crystal clear. I'm lying twisted on my back against the far wall of the dirty little hideout we'd been raiding when all hell had broken loose with a snap-crack-pop and a split-second daydream, sporting a broken shoulder and three bullets in my chest. There is blood on my clothes, blood in my mouth, and blood on the wall above me. I still cannot move, and my vision is blurry, but I can pinpoint Sho quite precisely by the sound of his voice and the scent of his blood. He's not so very far to my left - maybe four meters away from my foot, perhaps less - and there is no downward angle to his voice. The sound waves are coming dead at me, rolling across the very floorboards and sliding right into my ears; but there is human tissue in the way. Legs? They have to be legs, these things that sound like a forest. He's on the floor, surrounded by exactly ten legs; only five people, though I am sure there are more in other rooms. He's bleeding. He's angry. He's fighting them with a bullet in his shoulder - fighting a losing battle against eight hands that won't let him get up. And he's starting to get just a little bit scared.  
  
The fact is that, most likely, I can move if I try. I can probably blink, and swallow, and flex my fingers. I might even be able to shift my weight - but I probably can't stand up, and I don't have the luxury of trial and error. I don't have the time, either. When I move, I have to be sure. When I move, I have to be confident. When I move, I have to move fast and strong and straight at them. I cannot risk drawing attention to myself before I am ready to kill them. Right now, I am dead in their eyes. It gives me an advantage. When I do get up, I'll be the last thing in the world that they expect.  
  
For Sho's sake, I wait.  
  
I lie static in the carnage of the overturned card table, with blood cooling on my lips and in my throat. I do not blink. I do not swallow. Instead, I talk to Sho; silently, steadily, in a low cadenced chant within my own head. When he is listening, he can hear me; not always my words, but the quiet hum of their message behind his ears. Now I attempt to force myself upon him as I have never done before. I press silent, soothing words at him - and all the while, I will myself to remain still. The fact that I have to do so, now, is a solid indicator of my returning strength.  
  
It's working. He's not fighting quite so hard, now; he's catching his breath while they go through his pockets and count up the money. He's breathing his way through the pain in his shoulder. Whether he knows it or not, he is listening to me. And I am listening to them.  
  
"Five... six... seven... this ain't all of it. Did you check the corpse?"  
  
"Yep. Nothin'"  
  
"Give it up, pretty boy. Money don't disappear."  
  
"Go fuck yourself." That's Sho, sounding very calm for a man who's seriously injured and absolutely furious.  
  
"I'm about to fuck that pretty little mouth of yours raw, unless I get the rest of that fucking money!!"  
  
Steel on bone and bone on wood. I can feel the gun barrel connect with Sho's cheekbone. I can feel his head snap sideways, feel his face hit the floorboards. I can feel the thick, rough hands patting him down, tearing his long coat off in a fury, sliding down his pants to search between his legs...  
  
And then Sho screams; a furious, indignant snarl that crescendos into an outraged shriek. Wordless and guttural, it tears from his throat in a short-clipped burst of desperate fury, rips straight through my ears and sears like a laser into the very foundation of my cognoscence. That voice is ghost-printed upon my very eardrums; pitch, pattern, timbre - every subtle nuance is encoded somewhere deep within the infrastructure of my psyche. I can pick out frequencies in it that human ears could never catch - the low hiss of bitter amusement, the faint tinge of fear that laces the higher registers. Though wordless, that scream speaks volumes to me.  
  
I can't help it. I look.  
  
His hips buck. His back twists. He's fighting them with every ounce of strength he has left, as they tear his clothes off piece by piece, rifling through them and tossing them aside. One of them pries his mouth open. Another pulls his legs apart. They'll search every inch of him, inside and out - and when they don't find the wad of cash hidden in the bottom of my boot, they will rape him out of sheer spite before they finally kill him.  
  
There is no more time for healing, for thinking, for planning a reach for the knife in my boot. There is no more time for waiting. The perfect moment isn't going to come, and I'm never going to be ready, and I don't have another split second to figure this thing out before I do it, for better or for worse.  
  
Ready or not, here I go.  
  
An infamous creature of the night once said that "the trick is not to think about it," - and never has a single statement held true under more circumstances than this one. Thinking leaves room for doubt - for all of the what-ifs and maybes that set you up for failure before you even begin. If I worry, they will rape him. If I panic, he will die. If I lose my nerve for half a moment, the past twelve years of my preternatural life bleed dry on the dirty floor of a Mallepa tenement.  
  
And so I don't think about it. It happens without me. One second I'm dead on the floor - the next my knife is in a back, then a throat. The room explodes in a kaleidoscope of emotions; shock and superstition override most basic instincts, terror rises - and somewhere in the midst of it all is a rush of blessed relief. The guns don't come out until the first one hits the floor, and the vanguard doesn't rush in from the back rooms until I'm already halfway through my next jugular. Running. Screaming. Praying. Cursing. Whatever else they're doing, they're all shooting at me. This time, I take the guns before I drop the bastard.  
  
After that, it is easy.  
  
It doesn't take long at all to exterminate them. I may be out of practice, but I'm faster than any three humans put together, and I have a hell of a lot more to lose. It's a simple thing to squeeze the trigger again and again, to aim death this way and that with a simple swing of my fully functional shoulder. The other is still knitting, still stiff, but it doesn't matter. They drop like flies, and the place is clear before I have to reload the gun. The waiting took forever. The killing takes mere minutes. Somehow, the irony of it all is almost comforting.  
  
A rustle. A whimper. I turn around.  
  
Sho has managed to drag himself upright. There's blood on his hands, blood on his chest, blood streaked down his right arm in jagged rivulets and pooling in the crook of his elbow. All the fury has drained from him, and only now are the fear and weakness starting to catch up. Sho is never truly afraid when he is angry - he only succumbs to it after the fact, when the dust has settled and some instinct in him knows that it is safe to do so. His eyes are dilated and distracted, darting from dead body to dead body with the wide-eyed detachment of one who's never seen death up close and personal. There is a scattered uncertainty to his movements. He reaches out with his good arm and draws his coat into his lap, tries to wrap it around himself - haltingly, clumsily, with the numb imprecision of someone wearing mittens - but it's not something that he can do one-handed and injured.  
  
I crouch down next to him in the carnage, pull the coat snug around him and whisper soothingly. Sho is more than willing to relinquish the job to me; he lets me guide his hands away, releases the fabric when I stroke his fingers gently. I can almost hear his nerves humming, drawn tight as piano strings, but all the fight is gone from him, now. He doesn't let me take control - he gives it to me willingly, gratefully, relieved to be free of choices and decisions and trusting me to do what's right. All he has to do is breathe. He knows that I will take care of the rest.  
  
And I do.  
  
I bind his wounded shoulder with a dead man's shirt. I wrap his bleeding fingers up. I wipe the blood from his face and chest, while Sho leans passive and compliant against me. His eyes are still wide and his breath his still short, and he's shaking right down to his bones - but his muscles are beginning to uncoil just a little. Now that he's left things to me, he's finding time to make sense of the past fifteen minutes; breaking the overwhelming series of events into manageable pieces and trying to process them one at a time. He lets me guide good arm into his coat, cries out only a little when I shift his bad arm into a makeshift sling. Tears threaten him a few times, but he swallows them down before they can amass any try force, and stares straight ahead at the graffiti-stained wall as I button his pants, lace up his boots. Sho rarely cries when we're out on the streets.  
  
He waits until we're home safe and sound; until the torturous cab ride to the clinic is over, and the back-alley doctor is paid through the nose, and the sedatives are well at work in his system. The money in my boot is more than enough to pay for decent antibiotics, x-rays, and ninety-two stitches to soundly close the hole in his shoulder. There are no broken bones, no permanent nerve damage. The doctor says that he will recover in full. For once, I would like to trust the opinion of the medical world, however questionable its quality may be. Sho is silent as a mouse through and through. I can barely hear the soft white noise of his thoughts, at times. When the doctor asks him questions - and he doesn't ask him many - I answer vaguely and confidently, while Sho stares at both of us with wary, tired eyes. It's easier to get a cab back to the apartment - we're in a better part of town, now, and they're spread thicker through these smokey neon streets. Sho sits on the curb while we wait, leaning against my leg.  
  
It happens almost as soon as we're through the door. He's fine until I sit him down on my day bed - but as soon as I touch him, the tears spill over, and soon enough he's sobbing silently but steadily against my shoulder. Even now, he is easy to hold; he's grown taller than me, but his head still fits perfectly in the crook of my neck, and my hand still fits perfectly over the sharp of his hip. I rub his back. I stroke his hair. I smooth the backs of my fingers over the places he likes best - along his jaw, and the soft part of his sides. It doesn't matter that he's barely said a word to me since the tenement - I speak to him in a soft, soothing voice, and he soaks it up like oxygen.  
  
Eventually, he cries himself out. It always happens that way. When Sho allows himself to really, truly cry, there is no simple off switch. He drains out the fear and the pain with tears, until there's nothing left and he's running on empty. He's always exhausted when he finally quiets, but the better for it in the morning. There's nothing I need to do besides hold him, steady him, follow all the little signals from his body and act accordingly. For twelve long years, I have soothed him while he cries. It is all second nature.  
  
"Are you okay?" he whimpers into my neck. I smooth his hair back, stroke his jaw.  
  
"I'm fine. Sore, but fine. Everything's okay now - we're home, we're safe, and we're both going to be all right. It's all over, baby," I press a gentle kiss to his forehead, and Sho lifts his face to me. I see twelve long years of comfort and hope in those liquid brown eyes, twelve long years of shared hardships and joys and most of all, love.  
  
"I love you," he says, for the very first time.  
  
"I love you too," I say.  
  
And just so he knows that it's true, I kiss him.  
  
A/N : Sorry about the wait - this chapter didn't want to end. I'll dedicate chapter four to the first person who can tell me to which infamous literary vampire really did say, "The trick... is not to think about it." :) 


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